Albury regional power, gas and water customers have recorded one of the highest dissatisfaction rates in NSW.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
This has been revealed in the Energy and Water Ombudsman NSW’s recently released annual report.
Albury is placed in the Murray region, which takes in more than a dozen local government areas.
The other councils covered include Greater Hume, Federation and Berrigan.
The report showed Murray had a rate of 42 complaints for every 10,000 residents.
Sydney Inner with 49, Central West with 45 and Far West with 43 were the only other of the 14 regions to record higher complaint rates.
The state average was 34 complaints for every 10,000 people.
That comes on top of similar data from Victoria’s Energy and Water Ombudsman that revealed Wodonga to be the most vulnerable for energy or water disconnections.
This was a rate of 1.3 cases for every 1000 people, compared with the state average of 0.54.
Ombudsman Cynthia Gebert told The Border Mail that the “disconnection” category included threatened disconnections.
The NSW ombudsman’s office did not have figures available for disconnections in Albury and surrounding towns.
But Energy and Water Ombudsman Janine Young did point out that affordability issues were a factor in 30 per cent of complaints from the Murray region.
That was well above the state average of 21 per cent.
Ms Young said affordability was a factor in 25 per cent of complaints from the Murrumbidgee region, which took in Lockhart and Wagga.
“Affordability issues, payment difficulties, high bills, increasing debt and disconnection of supply have become the norm for NSW consumers experiencing financial vulnerability and this is evident in the Murray region,” she said.
Ms Young said she had “seen first hand” the impact energy costs were having on people in Murray.
The rate of complaints from the Murray region though has been on the decline.
In 2015-15 there were 805 complaints, dropping by 31 per cent to 564 in 2015-16.
Complaints then dropped by a further 17 per cent in 2016-17 to 466.
But complaints from the region were 12 per cent higher in the fourth quarter of 2016-17 than for the same period in the previous year.
That reflected a NSW-wide trend.